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We Will Regret the Decline of Democracy
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We Will Regret the Decline of Democracy
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by Richard Gwyn
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THE OTHER DAY, a friend dropped an intellectual zinger on me.
"What are we doing today," she asked ruminatively, "that we, or our children, are going to find ourselves having to apologize for in a few years' time?"
Democracy is weakened as power shifts from nation-states to transnational corporations
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A neat question. Public confessionals have become a staple of our times, from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's apology for the 19th-century Irish potato famine (more exactly, for the British having done so little to mitigate the famine's effects) to our own apologies for incarcerating Japanese Canadians during World War II and to native Canadians for sending them to residential schools.
The point about these misdeeds being that at the time they were committed almost no one saw them as a crime.
Anyone's guess is as good as the next person's about what we're doing today, or are not doing, that will strike us or our descendants as inexcusably shameful in a few decades from now. The genocide in Rwanda, for example, that we did almost nothing about when it happened seven years ago — and are still doing almost nothing to prevent it happening again, whether in Rwanda or elsewhere in Africa. Or the way we've allowed an epidemic of AIDS to sweep across southern Africa, lowering life expectancy as it reverses the natural order of progress.
Let me toss out two thoughts. One is that there is, surely, something shameful, a grievous loss of a sense of community solidarity, in the way we've allowed income gaps to increase so that they are both wider than ever around the world and wider than they have been in a long time in most developed countries (in the instance of the U.S. and Britain, the two most market-oriented states, the widest since the '30s).
It isn't just that income gaps have become wider than ever when measured in dollars. It's that there's now an entrenched indifference to the very existence of these gaps. The sense of reciprocal obligations between citizens has thinned out and, therefore, the sense of equality among citizens has become frayed.
The other thought is that as time passes we will increasingly condemn ourselves for the way we've eroded and undermined that great achievement of Western civilization, namely democracy or the involvement of all citizens in their own governance.
That our democracy isn't what it once was can be measured by the decline in the number of people bothering to vote and in the decline of the effectiveness of political parties (to the point where their very existence seems pointless).
As important is the more subtle and permanent and irreversible decline in our democracy that happens as power shifts from nation-states, whose governments we elect, to the global market and to transnational corporations and international bureaucracies over which we have no — or almost no — control.
Just how we've let go of the substance of our democracy was shown when Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew proclaimed as "a historic first" that fact that all the governments of the western hemisphere had agreed to release the draft trade treaty they'll be discussing at their meeting in Quebec city at the end of this week.
In a strictly technical sense, Pettigrew was quite correct. Trade deals, which are immensely complicated affairs, have never before been made public until they've been signed. (Even this one, for a pan-Americas trade pact, won't be made public until after the Quebec city meeting where it will be negotiated).
Trade deals, though, are no longer just trade deals. They are now political instruments. They may improve our economic condition. But they weaken our political condition by transferring more and powers out of the control of national governments. It's absurd for Pettigrew to try to take credit for having helped convince his colleagues to do what they should have done long ago — that is, helped their citizens take part in their own governance by providing them with basic information about decisions that will affect their lives.
The only reason the hemispheric ministers agreed to make the document public was because of the pressure upon them of the anti-globalization civil society movement.
The point being that this civil society movement, for all its confusion and internal contradictions, is the only political voice that these days is speaking out on these two central issues of the diminution of our democracy and the magnification of our income gaps.
For what, specifically, will we one day have to apologize? For allowing our government to build a two-kilometre-long concrete and chain-link fence to keep as far away as possible from those people talking about — and, true, often also shouting about — democracy and income gaps.
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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